Title: He was Never Mine Chapter 8/9

Disclaimer: I don't own anything, I'm just playing with the character.

Once more, many thanks to my beta reader, Black Purple roses who always does a kick-ass job at making me want to post more…

Author's Note: Hey there… So I've enable anonymous reviews, so all you lurkers, you can go leave a word if you feel like it.

More seriously, this is the next to last part, as I had stated it could be a few parts part is extra angsty but the next one will be fluffier in a way. Last part will be an epilogue of some sorts. Since it's almost completely written and just needs to be typed, I can't really take request, but if you have lose ends you really want to see tied in that part, let me know so I can check I already did it or if I can make it fit in the chapter…

And last, Sorry if I'm making geography errors in this chapter… I'm French, and I've never been to Texas, so I had to rely on what I found on the Internet for all the distance things and if I messed it up badly, just know that I'm deeply sorry…

Chapter 8

"So I went to India, and it was amazing, but I'll spare you the details, because it's not relevant to this story. Volunteering was a more than full-time job, and I was beginning to really miss my family, so when one of us volunteers had to go back to the USA to get dozens of stuff, I asked to be the one to go home. It was a little over two years since I had left."

"When I got back to Dillon, it was so strange, but at the same time, it was home. People would stare at me in the streets and sometimes even came to catch up with me. I guess it felt awkward because the town had decided that I had gone just to do the Christian thing when really at some point it became about escaping everything: the town, Tim, Julie, football, everything."

"My siblings were delighted to see me, as were my parents. I realized I had even missed my mother's new husband. My parents wanted to throw me a welcome home party, but I was only staying for ten days so there was no point, and I was kinda dreading who they would want to invite."

"When in Mumbai, I had bonded with fellow volunteers, I had made some friends, even some girlfriends. I didn't date because I didn't feel like it, but when I learnt that I was coming back to Dillon for a visit, I suddenly remembered I had been celibate for two years. And though I didn't want to hope for anything, I wanted to know if Tim and Julie had managed to make it work, and if they hadn't, if Tim would be single too when I would be in Dillon. It was just crazy, I would only be staying for ten days, but I had a hard time pushing those thoughts away."

"Anyway, when I got to Dillon, I had a lot to do: catch up with my family, collect the stuff I had been sent to gather, etc… Since I didn't have many friends when I had left, I only went to see Jason. He was back in Dillon too, for some vacation with Erin and Aaron. We arranged to meet at a coffee a little out of town and started catching up."

Flashback

Lyla listened with a smile on her face to what Jason's story about Aaron first words and laughed a little. Only two years had gone, but she had missed so much… She chuckled at the punch line of the anecdote, feeling something close to nostalgia.

Her friend then proceeded to tell her about his son's first steps and also about his first bouts of mischief.

"I swear," Jason said, "sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing asking Tim to be his godfather. He's been busy these past years, but each time he offers to baby-sit Aaron, the baby always comes back having learnt some new trick that will drive me crazy. Thank God Julie babysits with him, she must keep him from making my kid too perverted."

'They're still together?" Lyla asked, her heart beating madly.

"Yeah, as strong as ever," Jason said with a proud smile on face. "I'm sorry, I 'm not being mean unknowingly or something? You are over him, right?"

"Sure. I'm just a little surprised they're still together. Not that they don't fit, it's just that when I left, Tim was going to A&M and Julie still had a year of high school to get through. It's usually really hard to maintain a relationship when one's in college and the other isn't."

"Oh, they managed, believe me. Since the Coach and Mrs Taylor were really supportive, they made it work. You known the A&M campus isn't so far from Dillon, so whenever he didn't need to hit the university library, he would come back. He kept on missing all the frat parties that first year. Julie did as well, she would drive to see him as often. They handled their semi-separation with dexterity. Julie got in A&M after graduation, and they have opted to move out of the dorms and together into one of the couple lodgings. If Tm wasn't their star Fullback, I'm not sure they would have been allowed to do so, it's usually for married couples and stuff."

"Wow… they moved fast. Didn't the Taylors have any objection to their daughter living in sin with her boyfriend?" Lyla asked, dazzled.

"You were gone, so you didn't witness it, but in the past two years they have been together, Tim and Julie showed great maturity, not to mention certifiable commitment. Dillon may think that they are living in sin but the Taylors are fine with it. I'm not saying the Coach didn't have some major objection at first, but he got convinced that it was better to let them move in together and settle down a little rather than make them run around the campus, in each other's dorm to be together. I had never noticed how close Tim had gotten to the Taylors, but he earned their confidence, so in the end, the Coach agreed to their plans."

"That's good. So he is happy?"

"Yes, he is. I wouldn't have believed it a couple of years ago, but we all grew up and went our own ways, in directions we couldn't have foreseen then."

"Do you think he's going to propose?" Lyla heard herself asking. "I mean, you did propose to Erin, right? Do you think he's going to follow your example?"

"I find it doubtful, really. I had a baby with the woman so I had to adapt faster. Tim has changed, but he didn't become as naïve as say, Matt Saracen, who once admitted to me when under major influence that he had always thought that he would propose really soon to Julie after high school. Poor boy."

"How is he nowadays? He can't still be pining for the Taylor girl."

"He went to Annapolis to become an officer, he's following in his father's footsteps. I really don't think it was his calling, but his grandmother's health and sanity is getting poorer, and he needed to have her put in a medical facility, which cost money. Military universities are the only one where you get paid for studying, so he did what he had to do for his family. He spent his last year of high school trying to come up with better solutions but it didn't work out. Besides, after he tried to put the moves while drunk on a very non-consenting Julie, he realized it was time to move on, preferably elsewhere."

"Don't you sympathize a little with him? I mean the boy was in love, you don't simply move out of it."

"You don't, but when the one your love doesn't love you back anymore, or falls for somebody else, you have to weigh the pros and cons but generally, you have no choice but to set them free. I let you get together with Tim, didn't you do the same when Tim chose Julie?"

"I guess," she shrugged.

"But really, I don't blame him," Jason went on, "I blame Dillon. That's what I learnt, living in Dallas. There are some good things that come from living and being raised there, but we also had it so much worse than plain kids. Football is not a sport, it's a divine hobby there, and we were shaped and thought of according to football. Matt was QB1, which made him more worthy of dating the Coach's daughter. When Julie fell for Tim, it messed with the perfect picture the town had planned for them, so everybody started coaching Matt into believing that he would get her back. He let them do, let their rumors fill his fantasies. He realized what he had been doing after the pathetic drunk accident, and it was better late than never. When Tim kicked his ass for hitting on his girlfriend, and when he saw how scared Julie had been of him, he suddenly realized that he had been playing a part the town had written for him. So he left. He actually told Tim a while later that he kinda wished he had kicked his ass sooner, like the year before, so that he could have gotten his act together sooner, that he could have discovered that he was being played like a puppet sooner."

"I remember Tyra once telling me that Julie was trying her best to keep Tim from beating Matt up."

"That kinda proves both Matt's and my point. The town expected the fight to take place, it thought that Julie would go back to Matt, horrified by the violence Tim would have expressed. That's one of the reasons the town was so shocked by the Tim and Julie relationship: Dillon had been pulling everybody's strings, possibly without even knowing it, out of habit but when they decided to be together, they disrupted the kind of perfect town act it had going. My injury and your conversion had disturbed it too, but to a lesser degree when you had gotten with Tim and proceeded to be the good Christian around him. I guess the town can adapt a little. Julie and Tim refused to have their strings pulled. I'm not sure it would have been possible if the Taylors had lived in Dillon all along and if Tim hadn't been constantly kept at arms' length except when needed for his football skills. But it's good, the fact that Dillon just doesn't get its way, that people can chose to follow a different path. Besides, it gives the town more life, it reaches out of its comfort zone. Mark my words, in ten to fifteen years, even though the kids won't have a clue, they will be benefiting everyday from the consequences of the town scandal that was the Tulie business."

He laughed when he saw her startled expression.

"You've been gone for so long!" he exclaimed for the umpteenth time that day. "When Tim and Julie had to face Dillon's wrath that first year, Erin started calling them the Tulie item, and it kinda stuck."

End Flashback

"Cute," Holly said but then frowned. "You must have been devastated."

"Yeah, but at the same time, what Jason said really made sense. Dillon has always been like a third party in all relationships I've had, and I accepted that. I always thought it came with dating a Panther. I realized that it didn't have to be this way. Anyway, that fed my reflections for a while. It was like a new light had been shed on my failed love story with Tim. A few days later, I went back to India. I didn't come back until three years later, this time for good, with the intent to enroll in college. If I'm a little honest, the delay wasn't innocent. In the past five years, Tim would have had the time to complete his courses and graduate."

"Anyway, I came back for my siblings, but mostly for myself. It was time to face the past's ghosts and move on. Mumbai was perfect, but I wouldn't have been able to do it if my parents hadn't provided for me for so long. When my father had his accident and almost lost his life, it was a wake-up call. My family had supported me, it was time for me to repay the favor. I got first in community college then in here. Let's skip the details of my homecoming. A few weeks after I had enrolled at university and moved back, I had to go to the Dillon County mall for some insignificant shopping. I had managed so far to avoid everybody from high school, even though I had been informed by my dad about where they were all at. It was the first time in five years I met with any of the two I was dreading the most to see again.

Flashback

Saying that it felt weird to be there again was nothing short of a euphemism. Lyla clenched the shopping list in her hand, hoping she could get it done in a minimum time, so that she could escape all the staring. In her apartment complex, people were either too young or too old to remember the way she had left Dillon all those years ago, and for that she was grateful. Here, people remembered her: She could have sworn that the twenty something year old woman staring a hole in her back while pacifying her two toddlers had been a Rally girl when she herself was a cheerleader. She realized that for her, time had stopped when she had stepped in Mumbai, but obviously it had kept running for people in Dillon. When she had visited, a few years ago, she hadn't gotten that feeling since she had avoided everybody but Jason, but now she saw it.

She hastened her pace and got into a cosmetic shop, intending to grab a nice bottle of perfume for Tabby's birthday. She stood for a few minutes in front of the huge stand, blaming capitalism for the extreme variety of fragrances available.

A younger girl ran in her direction, past her to another display.

"Gracie! Be careful!" She heard. "I'm sorry, my sister is slightly over enthusiastic today and… Lyla?"

It may have been five years, but strangely, she remembered that voice clearly. She turned around to face the apologetic woman and said:

"Hello Julie."

The girl, -woman she amended-, had aged slightly but oh so gracefully. She still had long hair but it was pulled in a messy bun on top of her head. Her freckles were shining significantly, giving her juvenile charm on top of healthy. The blonde's beauty had blossomed and matured over the years.

"Woah… It's been so long," the blonde said before screaming: "Come back here Gracie, you won't find what you're looking for there. Sorry," she said to Lyla, "I didn't mean to tear your eardrums, but that kid is on a sugar high, and it's exhausting. How have you been? I heard you were in India."

"I was," Lyla answered, scrutinizing the girl's face, amazed by her transformation.

She hadn't expected Julie to remain as she was when 16 forever, but it felt weird. She was exuding confidence and happiness.

"I came back a few weeks ago, I'm going to attend college here. Is that really Gracie?" She asked, pointing to the little girl playing with makeup.

"Yep, I know. One minute, they're cute, having the time of their life trying to make their whole hand fit in their mouth, and the next, they're running everywhere and demanding attention."

Lyla chuckled a little.

"What brings you here?" she asked.

"My mother's birthday. We're just picking up some bath oils for her and I need to get a refill for my perfume," Julie said while keeping a close eye on the little girl. "What about you?"

"My sister's birthday is coming up, and since I've been out of the loop for the past few years when it comes to music and movies, I figured a perfume would be a safe bet. Do you have any advice for me?"

"This one," Julie said pointing to a weirdly shaped bottle, "is supposed to be the next Nina Ricci."

Lyla checked it quickly then grabbed a new packaged bottle and said:

"Thanks, you just saved my day. So what have you been up to?"

"Not much," Julie said. "I'm starting my last year of college, where I'm getting an English lit degree. I'm at A&M. I've been going from one crappy internship at a newspaper to another, trying to figure out what my calling is. I'm sure you have much more exciting stories to tell."

A phone beeping interrupted them, and she grabbed her cell phone to read the text message she had received. She then motioned to her little sister to come back. The blonde girl bounced back to them, grinning.

"What's up?" she asked.

"Tim found the movie and the CD we were looking for in Dallas, so you just need to pick the bath salts and we'll be all set."

"Cool!" she exclaimed before going to sniff all the bath products available in the shop to make her choice.

"How is Tim?" Lyla asked, hoping she was sounding as casual as she wanted to be.

"Good. He was just in Dallas to sign his contract. He's been recruited by the Cow Boys, have you heard?"Julie asked with a proud smile.

"Yeah, I think I read it somewhere," Lyla said.

The Dillon newspaper had made its front page with that piece of news and was making regular update on it those past few days.

"He must be thrilled," the brunette commented.

"He is. He's also a little nervous about all the changes that are gonna take place then, but he will be fine. Besides, we're working on the details. Since I won't have too many classes, we're leaving campus for good, and we're looking for a place in the Dallas suburbs. Moving is gonna be a bitch, but we'll manage…"

"I'm sure you will. It's really cool that you guys are working out," Lyla said, wondering if it was indeed something appropriate for her to say.

"We're good," Julie said with a shrug, seeming to wonder herself what would be a good answer to that statement.

"You've been together for what, five years now?"Lyla said, pretending to think hard to come up with the right length. "Any plans of marriage? Has he proposed?"

"Yeah, quite a few times already, but since it was mostly post-coital or after a really good meal I cooked, it doesn't really count as a proper proposal, or at least I have discarded it as such," Julie said, a little defensively.

Lyla realized quickly than her attempt at being casual had been misinterpreted as rude. Julie didn't seem to want to get in a fight, but she wouldn't stand idle while her man wasn't getting the proper respect he deserved. To top it all, the inquiry about their future plans had also been seen as aggressive, and the blonde wasn't having any of it.

"I mean, we've discussed getting married a few times," the blonde said, "but right now the timing isn't right. We were too young before, and now I need to finish school. I think we'll discuss it more seriously when I graduate. We're in no hurry, you know? We've made it for five years so far without getting hitched, and it has been five great years. I'm sure we could do it another five years in the same fashion. I mean, I don't want to gloat, but what we have is already perfect, so why rush things?" she said, rubbing her nose. "What about you?"

"I'm single right now, but it's cool. I need to settle back before jumping back into the dating game."

Both women kept silent, the awkwardness of the situation becoming too obvious to overlook. They didn't know what they were supposed to say next, there were just too many eggshells begging to be stepped on… Lyla looked around before eyeing the bags the blonde was holding, hoping that a mark could become their next topic of conversation, when a box with a distinctive logo in a cheap drug store bag caught her attention. Julie saw her glance and shifter her bags around to hide it.

'Let's go with this one," Gracie said, reappearing from nowhere. "I've picked honey. Mommy loves honey, right?" she asked her sister.

"Yes, she does. It's perfect. Let's go pay."

She took the little girl's hand and said:

"It was nice to see you again Lyla. I hope things will work out for you."

"Likewise."

"And maybe the next we meet, we'll move pass the awkwardness and have a real nice chat… This was a little too weird. See you around Lyla," she said, while going to the cash register.

Lyla simply nodded and pretended to look at the perfume display some more, waiting to give enough time to the Taylors women to pay and leave before she went to pay herself.

"What a crappy day," she thought on her way out. "Crappy, crappy, crappy."

End Flashback

"Julie wouldn't have been herself if she hadn't commented on the uneasiness, she's too much like her mother in that way," Lyla said with a smirk.

"But why did it get so strange?"

"I think it was my fault. I had no idea how to interact with her. Maybe it was because she didn't get my meaning, or maybe it was because she caught me checking out the pregnancy test she had bought. Anyway, that's all there is. It's the end of that story.

"That's it?"

"Yep. That was the last time I saw either one of them. That's the end of the pathetic story of Tim and Lyla. Don't tell me I need to move on, I'm painfully aware of that, I'm just kinda stuck. I know that he has moved on, and that I should do the same," she said, motioning to the discarded newspaper. "I wish he wasn't so in my face all the time though."

"Stop reading the sport section for starters," Holly offered.

"You made me! Plus, he was once in the food section. Turns out he can really cook, he bought a small restaurant where he is the chef a night a week. It's part of his plan for when he retires from football. How was I supposed to expect to read about him there? Really?"

"Hot, a man who can cook… Sorry, I was just spacing out. Anyway, thank you for telling me your story, a lot of things make sense now. But be assured that you can count on me. We'll make you move on, you and I. So he was never yours, but at least you see it now. You confessed everything, it's the perfect opportunity to put old dreams and fantasies to rest."

"I'm not sure I can. I want to, but it's been so long…."

"Yeah, ten years. And you haven't seen him once in flesh in all this time. We're moving Lyla Garrity, you and I. I won't let you wallow in despair. We should have a Colin Firth marathon tonight, it will get the mood off…"

"I do love his accent…"

Holly stood proud, with her hands on her hips, thinking about all the things she had learnt about her roommate today. It was a whole new side of her she had been introduced too then, and she thought about the things they could do to try and get Lyla out of the depressing mood she had been lately.

"So, Colin Firth tonight. Good, I'll go pick some ice-cream and… .wait, didn't you say something about a pregnancy test?"

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